Natural Slaves Research Articles

Animalizing the Slave: the Truth of Fiction

In his discussion of natural slavery in the first book of the Politics (1254a17–1254b39), Aristotle notoriously assimilates human slaves to non-human animals. Natural slaves, Aristotle maintains (1254b16–20), are those who differ from others in the way that the body differs from the soul, or in the way that an animal differs from a human being; and into this category fall ‘all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service’. The point is made more explicit in the argument (1254b20–4) that the capacity to be owned as property and the inability fully to participate in reason are defining characteristics of the natural slave: ‘Other animals do not apprehend reason but obey their instincts. Even so there is little divergence in the way they are used; both of them (slaves and tame animals) provide bodily assistance in satisfying essential needs’ (1254b24–6). Slaves and animals are not actually equated in Aristotle's views, but the inclination of the slave-owner in classical antiquity, or at least a representative of the slave-owning classes, to associate the slave with the animal is made evident enough. It appears again in Aristotle's later statement (1256b22–6) that the slave was as appropriate a target of hunting as the wild animal.

Animalizing the Slave: the Truth of Fiction

In his discussion of natural slavery in the first book of thePolitics(1254a17–1254b39), Aristotle notoriously assimilates human slaves to non-human animals. Natural slaves, Aristotle maintains (1254b16–20), are those who differ from others in the way that the body differs from the soul, or in the way that an animal differs from a human being; and into this category fall ‘all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service’. The point is made more explicit in the argument (1254b20–4) that the capacity to be owned as property and the inability fully to participate in reason are defining characteristics of the natural slave: ‘Other animals do not apprehend reason but obey their instincts. Even so there is little divergence in the way they are used; both of them (slaves and tame animals) provide bodily assistance in satisfying essential needs’ (1254b24–6). Slaves and animals are not actually equated in Aristotle's views, but the inclination of the slave-owner in classical antiquity, or at least a representative of the slave-owning classes, to associate the slave with the animal is made evident enough. It appears again in Aristotle's later statement (1256b22–6) that the slave was as appropriate a target of hunting as the wild animal.

Loving Freedom: Aristotle on Slavery and the Good Life

Most commentators on Aristotle's theory of natural slavery locate the source of slavishness in an intellectual deficiency that Aristotle describes. This paper sets out to show that Aristotle's natural slaves are not intellectually deficient in the way normally assumed, but are lacking an emotional faculty, thymos, which Aristotle connects to actual enslavement through its power to generate a love of freedom. It is also argued that Aristotle's understanding of slavishness entails a risk for a democratic regime, such as Classical Athens, since such a system has highly inclusive criteria for membership in the political association. Commentators have also failed to connect natural slavery to Aristotle's ethical thought and to note the theory's practical relevance to the goal of living a good human life.

Humanist Ethics and Political Justice

In the debate over Spanish treatment of the natives of the New World, both sides regularly invoked Aristotle on natural slaves. This paper argues that the interpretation of the Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto displays a greater understanding of Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition of justice than that of Juan Gines de Sepulveda, the Spanish Humanist. The paper goes on to argue that it is the humanist tradition itself that disposes Sepulveda to misconstrue Aristotle and the tradition of political justice.

Natural Law and Poetic Justice: A Carneadean Debate in Cicero and Virgil

Previous articleNext article No AccessNatural Law and Poetic Justice: A Carneadean Debate in Cicero and VirgilJames E. G. ZetzelJames E. G. Zetzel Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 91, Number 4Oct., 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/367522 Views: 15Total views on this site Citations: 8Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1996 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jed W. Atkins, Thomas Bénatouïl The Cambridge Companion to Cicero's Philosophy, 22 (Dec 2021).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108241649Daniel Kapust Roman Patriotism, (Jul 2020): 47–67.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54484-7_42Charles Martindale, Fiachra Mac Góráin The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, 5 (Jul 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316756102Syrithe Pugh “Gods that faine to be”: Political Euhemerism in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, English Literary Renaissance 49, no.11 (Dec 2018): 28–73.https://doi.org/10.1086/700304Michael C. Hawley Cicero on the Problem of Unjust Origins, Polity 50, no.11 (Dec 2017): 101–128.https://doi.org/10.1086/695356Daniel Kapust Roman Patriotism, (Aug 2017): 1–21.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30534-9_42-1A. Dirk Moses Das römische Gespräch in a New Key: Hannah Arendt, Genocide, and the Defense of Republican Civilization, The Journal of Modern History 85, no.44 (Jul 2015): 867–913.https://doi.org/10.1086/672532Benjamin Straumann Ius erat in armis: The roman and spanish empires and their discontents, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13, no.44 (Mar 2007): 597–607.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02923029

Commentary on "Multiple Personality and Moral Responsibility"

Commentary on “Multiple Personality and Moral Responsibility” Stephen R. L. Clark (bio) Theaitetos sleeping is not quite “the same” as Theaitetos waking, any more than Alcibiades drunk is Alcibiades sober. Nor am I, at fifty, quite “the same” as Stephen was when he was five. In one way, my sober fifty-year-old waking self can reasonably disclaim responsibility for what Stephen did or seemed to do when he was dreaming, drunk, or five years old. Those other Stephens were not “fully responsible,” were not doing what they freely chose because they chose it—though it would be odd to deny that they were acting willingly. Nor am I now very likely to do the things that—drunk, asleep, or five years old—“I” did: in that sense I can disown those actions and never fully “owned” them anyway. Maybe now I can even disown such actions as I once really owned: once I thought them the right thing, and now I do not. On the other hand, as Stephen Braude says, even children (even, he might have added, dogs) are treated “as if” they are “responsible”: as if, that is, they know what they were doing and may be deterred from doing it again. Should Alcibiades sober be made accountable for what “he” did when drunk? Why not, if this deters him from getting drunk again? Perhaps, as Aristotle suggested, those who do wrong when they are drunk should be fined double the amount. Perhaps those who find it difficult not to drink habitually should be fined ten times the amount. What matters is the amount of money that will put them off, that will force them to “take responsibility” for their own future lives. People who know that they can’t trust themselves when they are drunk, sexually excited, or driving a fast car must put it out of their own power to be in those positions—and if they can’t do that, then others must do it for them. Free men and women “take responsibility,” take charge of their own lives, and wish to be held responsible for what they do and have done. Those who cannot “take control” must, technically, be slaves. There is no point expecting “natural slaves” to take control of their own lives; to measure what they want against what is allowed by society. Such “slaves,” at best, can be controlled by an immediate threat or prize. In a way, it is pointless to punish them, though it may be necessary to imprison, maim, or kill them. Much the same thing may be said of some who are not, strictly, slavish. Should eighty-year-olds be “held responsible” for what they did in their forgotten youth, a world away? They will not be doing it again, and may not, even now, have any greater understanding than the rest of us as to why they did it in the past. “Punishment” in such a case can only [End Page 55] be used to deter others who might follow the same path, to help them to control their lives in ways that do not injure others. Otherwise, we are not strictly speaking of “punishment” at all: perhaps more often than we like to admit, public condemnation, incarceration, or execution is a symbolic elimination of a perceived evil, whether or not we think, or have good grounds for thinking, that the victim is really guilty. The sacrificial victim carries away our anger or unhappiness. Pragmatically, in other words, we punish people for things that—even at the time of the action—they did not control, or which they have long forgotten. For punishment to deter them, they must understand what they are being punished for. For it to reform them, they must accept that the punishment inflicted is just. Those who neither understand nor accept punishment may still be treated harshly, for the sake of others—maimed, or killed, or simply (if we choose to be humane) imprisoned. There are some acts, so Aristotle said, below the level of humanity: such bestiality cannot be punished. It does not follow that the perpetrators should be “free.” Pragmatism permits us to retain the rites of sacrifice, even...

Aristotle's Natural Slaves: Incomplete Praxeis and Incomplete Human Beings

Aristotle's Natural Slaves: Incomplete Praxeis and Incomplete Human Beings EUGENE GARVER 1. IT IS DIFFICULT tO reconstruct Aristotle's argument for slavery and natural slaves because it seems a paradigm case of a great mind defending the indefensible .' I think, though, that it is possible to get some distance on the subject, so that examining the arguments on slavery is no more difficult than trying to understand his arguments against inertia or the void. In advance of reading Aristotle I am confident that his conclusion that natural slaves exist must be false,just like his conclusion that the void does not exist. But my better knowledge of physics seems to have a different role in my trying to figure out his arguments against the void than my similarly better knowledge of morality in my interpretation of his arguments for slavery. I will try to show that there is less difference between the two cases than one might think. I propose to gain the necessary distance by making central to my analysis three of the more puzzling and usually ignored or unexplained aspects of Aristotle's conception. First of all, in Politics I Aristotle claims that the slave belongs to the master and is a tool for prax/s rather than making. Second, in Politics VII he asserts that people naturally suited to be slaves are deficient not in logos but in thymos. Finally, I want to notice that Aristotle has two distinct arguments in Book I, one for the nature of slavery, and the second for the zSchofield's recent comment sums up the consensus: "[It] is a common complaint among scholars that Aristotle's idea of natural slavery is an anomaly within his philosophical system.... [Although] it might be granted argumenti causa that there are persons who satisfy Aristotle's description of natural slaves.., it is a massiveerror or pretence to assume that in the actual world (for Aristotle, the contemporary Greek world) slaves are what he calls natural slaves." Malcolm Schofield, "Ideology and Philosophy in Aristotle's Theory of Slavery," in Ar/st0te/es'"Politike': Akten des XI. symposium Aristotelicum (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 199o), 4. [173] 174 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:2 APRIL 1994 existence of people fitting the descriptions of slaves. It is only after he shows the necessity of the institution of slavery that he goes on to establish, as he sees it, the existence of natural slaves. As I will show, he needs that separation of the two questions, but that distinction will ultimately be the cause of the trouble with his argument. In my exposition, though, I will reverse Aristotle's order and begin by looking at the case for natural slaves, and then turn to the case for the institution of slavery. According to Aristotle, the souls of slaves are incomplete, ateles. A substance , such as a soul, is incomplete if it is defined by an essence, a formula or logos, outside itself. Its completion consists in reference to something outside itself. The soul of an earthworm, then, or of a domestic animal, qua animal, is not incomplete; itjust cannot do a lot of the things my soul can do. If the souls of slaves are incomplete, it follows that their energeiai can only be k/nese/s, actualizations of potentials qua potencies. My thesis is that the slave's actions are incomplete if and only if the slave's soul and his logos is incomplete. It is not obvious what it means for a soul to be incomplete, or how to tell whether a soul is incomplete, but criteria are available for determining whether an action is incomplete. The slave's actions on Aristotle's account are by their nature incomplete, and so his acts fit the definition of motion as the actualization of the potential qua potential.* Motions are incomplete actualities. Their completion lies outside themselves, in the end aimed at. When a movement reaches its end, motion is no longer taking place. It is no defect in a making, a poiesis, to be a motion; they are supposed to be incomplete (ate/es), because they are done for the sake of an end outside themselves. It...

Equality in Hobbes with Reference to Aristotle

It is a policy of Hobbes' polemic to state the crucial point or principle in the boldest form before embarking on qualifications. In just this spirit he asserts that men are equal by nature. Fifty variations among men in what is ordinarily considered to differentiate significantly—mental or physical powers—become unimportant for the matter at hand: politics. Thus, with a swift and elegant force, Hobbes turns the reader's mind away from the tradition of Aristotle's Politics wherein the mental powers among men are different to the extent of dividing mankind into those who are capable of participating in government and those, the natural slaves, whose lack of deliberative capacity condemns them to a servile, nondeliberative existence within the state.

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the Nature of the American Indians

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda epitomizes in many ways, both personally and intellectually, the cosmopolitanism of Spanish political thought in the sixteenth century. Educated in Italy, disciple of Pomponazzi, translator of Aristotle, chronicler of the Emperor and mentor of his son Philip, Sepúlveda is best known—and often misunderstood as the defender of the more unsavory aspects of the Spanish conquest and colonization in America—for his bitter controversy with Bartolomé de las Casas. To that debate Sepúlveda brought a humanist's training and outlook anchored in his devotion to Aristotle, but strongly tempered by his attachment to Saint Augustine. It is the purpose of this paper to examine Sepúlveda's ideas on the nature of the American natives, particularly the question of whether the Indians are natural slaves. Considerations of space, of course, rule out the possibility of undertaking here a detailed scrutiny of the foundations upon which those ideas rest. It can be said, however, that they are typically Renaissance views, a blend of traditions characteristic of the composite nature of the age's intellectual milieu.

The hamitic hyopthesis; its origin and functions in time perspecive

The anthropological and historical literature dealing with Africa abounds with references to a people called the ‘Hamites’. ‘Hamite’, as used in these writings, designates an African population supposedly distinguished by its race— Caucasian—and its language family, from the Negro inhabitants of the rest of Africa below the Sahara.There exists a widely held belief in the Western world that everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by these Hamites, a people inherently superior to the native populations. This belief, often referred to as the Hamitic hypothesis, is a convenient explanation for all the signs of civilization found in Black Africa. It was these Caucasoids, we read, who taught the Negro how to manufacture iron and who were so politically sophisticated that they organized the conquered territories into highly complex states with themselves as the ruling elites. This hypothesis was preceded by another elaborate Hamitic theory. The earlier theory, which gained currency in the sixteenth century, was that the Hamites were black savages, ‘natural slaves’—and Negroes. This identification of the Hamite with the Negro, a view which persisted throughout the eighteenth century, served as a rationale for slavery, using Biblical interpretations in support of its tenets. The image of the Negro deteriorated in direct proportion to the growth of the importance of slavery, and it became imperative for the white man to exclude the Negro from the brotherhood of races. Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798 became the historical catalyst that provided the Western World with the impetus to turn the Hamite into a Caucasian.